We are now in the midst of the Orionids stream. Weather in the
Netherlands is quite good for tourist activities. It's rather warm, dry and with some
little sunny spells especially in the eastern part of the country. The western part
is mostly cloudy. This is no good weather for observing Orionids as we experience
lots of high clouds.

Hi again! It's the night of sunday/monday 23/24 october now.
The western part of the Netherlands is covered by an altocumules cloudlayer.
The eastern part is mostly clear. Observers in that last area are in the position to observe
the Orionids. We received an e-mail from Arnold Tukkers who is preparing for an observing session.
Hans Betlem and kids too are located in the eastern part of the country and should be
able to do some observation right now. More later....

Although the Orionids are not known as a very active meteor shower,
I hoped to observe an increase in the counts around October 21st.
Automatic meteor observation were performed continuously from 16 through 24 October 2000.
Occasionally the measurements were interfered by Sporadic-E or Tropo.
Periods with a dead time of more than 5 minutes (of a 15 minutes period)
have been deleted.

15-minutes counts (red squares) of all meteors stronger
than 120dBm and duration >= 0.1 second. The black trendline is the 4-point
running average.

The figure shows all reflections with duration of at least
0.1 seconds and signal strength stronger than -120 dBm.
Each plotted square represents the number of counts per 15 minutes multiplied
by 4 to convert to hourly rates.
The black line is the 4-point running average.
For the midpoint between The Netherlands and Spain the radiant of the Orionids
rises at 21h UTC and sets at 11h UTC.
The theoretically most favourable observability for the Draconids
is around 3h UTC and 7h UTC with a low observability around 5h UTC.
Unfortunately the maximum observability takes place around the daily maximum
of the sporadics. Nevertheless the counts around 21/22 October
show increased activity of the Orionids of about 100 meters/hour.
Some structure is visible around the daily maximum,
and it is tempting to explain this as the observability function of the Orionids.
But a similar structure was also present around October 8th
(see Draconids somewhere else on this website),
so this is probably not caused by the Orionids.